CALAMITY HOWLER/A.V. Krebs

Farmers Can't Eat Rhetoric

Undoubtedly in the coming debate over the 2007 Farm Bill and the
2008 presidential campaign the name and ideals of Thomas Jefferson as
they apply to family farm agriculture will be repeatedly invoked. To
most family farmers, unfortunately, it will be empty political
rhetoric.

It has been said partly in jest, partly in serious reflection
that our nation's farmers frequently reach all the right conclusions
for the wrong reasons as they go about attempting to assess their
plight in relation to "America's chronic agricultural crisis."

The confusion regarding what exactly is meant by the term "farm
fundamentalism;" how the agrarian ideals of Thomas Jefferson, who
believed so strongly in the family farm system in America, have been
corrupted, how the Protestant ethic has been used by corporate
agribusiness and its "communities of economic interest" as a means to
divide and conquer rural America, all have played major roles in
creating the hodgepodge of thinking that ones finds today all too
often in many of our farm communities and urban centers.

Lost in this cacophony of self-evaluation is the one fact that
seldom have the farmers' movements, except for perhaps the agrarian
populists, seen their own movements in the context of a fundamental
and deliberately constructed gap between the persistent
maladjustments of the economic structure of agriculture and social
status of rural America on the one hand and the economic and social
status of urban America on the other.

To better understand how this gap has been constructed it is
important that we first recount some of those fundamental
characteristics which have become the hallmark and associated with
the American family farmer.

Second, we must recognize how on the one hand the so-called
Protestant ethic has helped mold and shape those characteristics
while at the same time we understand how those ideals fashioned by
Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton have been influencing the
political, economic and social thinking of our farm communities.

Finally, we need to evaluate the content and nature of the
principal attack that is being made on our current family farm system
as it has been evolving from and responding to these aforementioned
influences.

Despite past perceptions by their urban neighbors, farmers have
always possessed an essential intelligence, both in their adaptation
to the environment, in the matter of self-preservation and in
individual self-expression. At the same time they have essentially
remained attuned to the manifestations of rural life, or as Ralph
Waldo Emerson once observed, the farmer is a "slow" person, "timed to
nature, not to city watches."

While desirable, the truth of the matter is that Emerson's ideal
has unfortunately pretty much remained just that -- an ideal, for the
reality of the situation has been quite a bit different. Discussing
the nature of land ownership in this country, it was pointed out by
the Protestant theologian Dr. Walter Brueggemann that "the city is
not simply a place, the city is a way of thinking about social
reality."

Likewise, since most land ownership in this country historically
has either been exercised or controlled by those who live timed to
"city watches," it can be said that many family farmers within the
capitalist system have frequently found themselves powerless.

As a property owner, head of the family and imagined ruler of his
own economic destiny, many a family farmer continues to mistakingly
identify with the wealthy and dominant class despite the fact that
the erosion of the farm economy keeps robbing him of all vestiges of
any real financial or political power.

It was James Madison who wrote that, "those who hold and those
who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in
society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall
under a like discrimination." It was also Madison who, quite wisely,
said that "all men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain
degree."

For nearly a century it has been exceedingly difficult for most
commercial family-type farmers to accept the fact that they have been
evolving into proletarians, producers of raw materials for what has
essentially become a oligopolistic food manufacturing industry.
Instead, they doggedly cling to the myth of their own
independence.

Slowly farmers have come to realize that their production costs
and the markets for their commodities are being determined by factors
unrelated to the inherent physical or human resources or even the
theoretical world demand for such commodities.

The fact that there is really no such thing in agriculture today
as a "free market" is often overlooked today in the farmers' desire
to successfully integrate themselves into the nation's present
economic structure.

Agriculture itself, it has been said, is competitive, although in
reality it is totally dependent on noncompetitive sectors. It is
sandwiched between a tightly concentrated inputs industry which
protects its profits by passing on its cost to the farmer and an
equally small number of commodity traders able to play off producers
on one side of a nation or globe against those producers on the other
side.

Addressing this very question in a brilliant Gregory Foundation
Memorial Lecture on "The Rural Foundation of American Culture" at the
University of Missouri on Jan. 26, 1976, Dr. Walter Goldschmidt
observed:

"I said earlier that one aspect of the Protestant ethic is a
belief that each individual's value is established by his
accomplishment, and that for that reason each person should be
allowed to grow as wealthy and powerful as he can. But this
unfettered growth of wealth and power threatens the very social
framework out which it has emerged. It is not an easy dilemma to, for
it confronts freedom with equality -- an age-old issue ...

"How much freedom? How much equality? Very much is at stake, not
only for the farm communities, but for the whole of the American
polity.

"If, as I have suggested, the growth of corporate of agriculture
is not a product of efficiency, intelligence and hard work -- of
virtue according to the Protestant Ethic -- but a consequence of
policies and manipulations, the matter takes on a different
character. The task is to reformulate policies respecting agriculture
so that the competitive advantage of large scale operations are
removed, so that the ordinary working farmer has an equal chance. If
this is, it may not be necessary to resolve the dilemma between
freedom and equality."

It is necessary that in any discussion of the shaping of the farm
character and how that character has impacted on the development of
US farm and food policy and that process from which it has evolved
one must immediately recognize the importance of the questions posed
above by Dr. Goldschmidt. How much freedom? How much equality? And,
who has primarily benefited from US agricultural and food policy
decisions?

A.V. Krebs publishes the online newsletter, The Agribusiness
Examiner, email avkrebs@comcast.net. He is author of The Corporate
Reapers: The Book of Agribusiness.